Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Warren Block wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
>
>> We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. So I am 
>> confident that we have the dhcpd.conf and the root filesystem sufficient 
>> for diskless booting. But now we would like to have menu of OSs to boot and 
>> got the idea somewhere that gpxelinux could do that for us. We copied 
>> gpxelinux.0 from the syslinux-4.02 distribution and replaced pxeboot with 
>> "gpxelinux" in the dhcpd.conf file. Indeed with a configuration file in 
>> pxelinux.cfg like this:
>>
>>  default freebsd
>>  label freebsd
>>    PXE pxeboot
>> 
>> and the root path still specified as a DHCP option, FreeBSD 8.1 does boot. 
>> If I replace the first line with:
>>
>>  UI menu.c32
>> 
>> the client does display the menu and but if one hits return to select the 
>> single item offered the client merely hangs for a minute, then announces 
>> "boot failure". I am guessing that once the UI is interposed, somehow the 
>> root path isn't getting transmitted to pxeboot.
>
> 4.01 works, both with menu.c32 and vesamenu.c32.  I can't say I've 
> experimented much farther, but used it when writing this:
>
> http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html
>
>> All the other gpxelinux boot kernels seem to expect the information about 
>> the root filesystem to be specified in the pxelinux.cfg file, rather than 
>> in dhcpd.conf.
>
> FreeBSD's pxeboot isn't as versatile as others.
>
>> Does anyone have experience with this? FreeBSD isn't mentioned anywhere I 
>> can find in the syslinux or gpxelinux documentation, and the various web 
>> posting I have found linking FreeBSD to gpxelinux are all about do 
>> installations of iso files over the net.
>
> Yes, that's one of the reasons I wrote the article above.
>

We finally got the thing working - by simply dropping gpxelinux and using 
pxelinux instead.

Daniel Feenberg